August 11, 2008

How to Disable middle mouse Autoscroll

Having switched to a new laptop (long story short, broke yet another one), it came with Vista and IE7 Grrr...

I just spent the better part of an hour researching the M$ help for ways to disable the middle mouse autoscroll "feature" in IE7

For those not suffering this monstrosity, autoscroll is what happens when you press your middle mouse button then move the mouse, you get what looks like a compass circle on your screen and now the page can scroll up, down, left or right with the mouse movement.

The official response is that you cannot disable autoscoll in IE7, although there are urban legends floating around that setting the vertical scrolling to 1 or 'one page at a time' inside your Control Panel Mouse properties Wheel tab. No, this does not stop autoscroll.

Firefox on the other hand is smart and gracious enough to provide us with an option:

Options > Advanced, General tab to turn off autoscrolling.

Adding insult to injury, here's another easy way to turn off autoscroll in Firefox:

Type about:config in the the Firefox address bar, scroll down to general.autoscroll, double click it and bingo, no more autoscroll.

All that's missing in Firefox is a button that uninstalls Windows Vista and IE7 !